The Adventures of Jimmie Dale eBook

With these conclusions finally thrust home upon him,
Jimmie Dale philosophically subordinated the matter
in his mind, and, leaning back, composed himself as
comfortably as he could upon his seat. There was
a man beside him, and he could feel the legs of two
men on the seat facing him. These, with the driver,
would make four. He was still well guarded!
The car itself was a closed car—­not hooded,
the sense of touch told him—­therefore a
limousine of some description. These facts, in
a sense inconsequential, were absorbed subconsciously;
and then Jimmie Dale’s brain, remorselessly
active, in spite of the pain from his throbbing head,
was at work again.

It seemed as though a year had passed since, in the
early evening, as Larry the Bat, he had burrowed so
ironically for refuge in Chang Foo’s den—­from
her! It seemed like some mocking unreality, some
visionary dream that, so short a while before, he
had read those words of hers that had sent the blood
coursing and leaping through his veins in mad exultation
at the thought that the culmination of the years had
come, that all he longed for, hoped for, that all
his soul cried out for was to be his—­“in
an hour.” An hour—­and he
was to have seen her, the woman whose face he had
never seen, the woman whom he loved! And the hour
instead, the hours since then, had brought a nightmare
of events so incredible as to seem but phantoms of
the imagination.

Phantoms! He sat up suddenly with a jerk.
The face of the dead chauffeur, the limp form lashed
in that chair, the horrible picture in its entirety,
every detail standing out in ghastly relief, took form
before him. God knew there was no phantom there!

The man beside him, at the sudden start, lifted a
hand and felt hurriedly over the bandage across Jimmie
Dale’s eyes.

Jimmie Dale was scarcely conscious of the act.
With that face before him, with the scene re-enacting
itself in his mind again, had come another thought,
staggering him for a moment with the new menace that
it brought. He had had neither time nor opportunity
to think before; it had been all horror, all shock
when he had entered that room. But now, like
an inspiration, he saw it all from another angle.
There was a glaring fallacy in the game these men
had played for his benefit to-night—­a fallacy
which they had counted on glossing over, as it had,
indeed, been glossed over, by the sudden shock with
which they had forced that scene upon him; or, failing
in that, they had counted on the fact that his, or
any other man’s nerve would have failed when
it came to open defiance based on a supposition which
might, after all, be wrong, and, being wrong, meant
death.

But it was not supposition. Either he was right
now, or these men were childish, immature fools—­and,
whatever else they might be, they were not that!
Not A singledropofpoisonhadpassedthechauffeur’slips. The man had not been murdered in that
room. He had not, in a sense, been murdered at
all. The man, absolutely, unquestionably, without
a loophole for doubt, had either been killed outright
in the automobile accident, or had died immediately
afterward, probably without regaining consciousness,
certainly without supplying any of the information
that was so determinedly sought.